Intertemporal meditation regulates time perception and emotions: an exploratory fNIRS study.
Feng Xiao, Qimei Peng, XiaoTian Wang
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience January 18, 2025 DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsaf080 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Within-subject design with fNIRS recording Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Young adults |
| Interventions | Intertemporal meditation Mindfulness meditation |
| Topics | Meditation |
| Keywords | Emotion regulation Episodic future thinking Fnirs Intertemporal meditation Mindfulness meditation Time perception |
| Key points | Intertemporal meditation shortened time perception and made participants feel more peaceful and less anxious, with higher overall brain activations than mindfulness meditation alone. |
Abstract
Mental time travel enables humans to project life episodes into the future, shaping present behaviour through episodic future thinking. This study explored the effects of repeated mental time travel from the present to the end of life on the time perception and emotional experiences of young adults. Unlike previous studies that focused solely on a single moment (present or death), we introduced intertemporal meditation, which combines mindfulness meditation and episodic future thinking. Using a within-subject design combined with fNIRS recording, we compared pre-meditation with post-meditation measures in both mindfulness and intertemporal meditation conditions. Behavioural results showed that intertemporal meditation shortened time perception and made the participants feel more peaceful and less anxious. The fNIRS results revealed that intertemporal meditation resulted in higher overall brain activations than mindfulness meditation. Hemodynamic measures revealed significant left-lateralized activations in brain regions associated with emotion regulation and cognitive control, particularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior prefrontal cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex. In addition, right-lateralized activations in Broca's area and middle temporal gyrus indicated enhanced processing of social cues and autobiographical memory processing. These findings underscore the adaptive utility of intertemporal meditation in emotion regulation and its potential to improve cognitive control functions.
Comparable studies
Other experimental studies on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Cancer patients (clinical intervention study) | 2003 | Mixed methods: scale development, correlational, quasi-experimental, laboratory, experience-sampling, and clinical intervention study | |
| Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness. | 2008 | Controlled laboratory experiment | |
| Mindfulness and mind-wandering: Finding convergence through opposing constructs. | 2012 | Two studies: correlational study and experimental study | |
| Mental Training Enhances Attentional Stability: Neural and Behavioral Evidence | 2009 | Experimental study | |
| Mindfulness meditation and substance use in an incarcerated population. Incarcerated population | 2006 | Quasi-experimental with treatment-as-usual control condition |
Citations in the library
Cites 4
- How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective Perspectives on Psychological Science October 14, 2011
- Patterns of Brain Activity Supporting Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, and Theory of Mind, and Their Relationship to the Default Mode Network Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience July 6, 2009
- Let it be: mindful acceptance down-regulates pain and negative emotion. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience November 1, 2019
- The effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception. Consciousness and Cognition September 1, 2013